Genre boundaries mean nothing to the Body, who celebrate 15 years in the business with their most audacious statement to date in I Shall Die Here. The band, now based in Portland, Oregon after years spent in Providence, Rhode Island, take doom metal as their core template and shred it to pieces until it's completely unrecognizable. The band, a two-piece of drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/singer Chip King, plus longstanding studio collaborators Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, clearly felt something needed to change after their 2013 album, Christs, Redeemers. That album felt like a retreat, a surrender, a settling into type, where prior form and function was repeated, not forwarded. Enter Bobby Krlic, the British musician who records jaundiced electronic works under his Haxan Cloak moniker, who comes on board as producer, helping Buford and King rip the guts out of their sound to achieve maximal brutality.
Something that's evolved over time with the Body's work is their use of space, not just in their choral collaborations on prior records, but also in their other material. On I Shall Die Here it's their most potent weapon, giving the sound a greater sense of suggestion than ever before. The dips into near-silence, where machine noise is allowed to trail quietly in the mix, effectively work as cues to pry open the imagination. At times they even function like a scene in a horror movie, where you just know something bad is coming around the corner, but the sense of anticipation is so expertly orchestrated that the fear is only heightened when the moment finally hits. "Our Souls Were Clean" is the best example of that here—it's all echoing electronics that resemble a machine repeating on itself long after any human hand has touched it, ultimately turning into a convulsing swirl of noise that feels like being trapped in a constant spray of vomit over the two-minute close of the song.
It's not always clear who did what here, or how much Krlic overhauled the sound of the Body. In a sense it's better going into I Shall Die Here without knowing whether samples changed hands, or how strips of guitar were pulled out and inserted elsewhere. A strong air of album-as-standoff results, with musicians from different disciplines throwing daggers into each other's work, making it feel like everyone was eyeing each other uneasily across the studio floor. Such working methods could turn into a mess, but here it results in a great weight of tension sinking into the material. It's hard not to feel suffocated by it all when the death march beat of "To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me" pulls in layer upon layer of oppression. But there are also strong dynamics at work in "Seeds", especially when the song gets stripped down to the bare bones and a great sweep of noise jolts it back to life—a trick mirrored on the opening "Consumed" from Krlic’s Excavation. It makes it feel like ten tons of electricity are suddenly pulsing through the track.
An unrelentingly bleak worldview is presented throughout the Body's work, and often in their interviews as well. Occasionally they substitute desolation for ghoulish thrills, which is marginally less successful. The pitch-shifted spoken word intro to "Alone All the Way" adds an unwelcome touch of schlocky horrorcore, although the subsequent track—all air raid distress calls and isolated screeches in the dark—brings the murky air of pessimism that curls up around the album firmly back into view. At its strongest, on the standout "Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain", it's an album that takes a mazy journey through styles, not so much seeking common ground between them, but actively looking for the point of agitation that arises as they brashley bruise up against one another. So "Hail" takes in a great lattice of sound, bringing samples on board that resemble the compact structures of Autechre's Amber, along with treated industrial drums, great slabs of drone-y guitar, and King's blood-curdling shriek.
The collective work on I Shall Die Here makes it feel like all involved were searching for illogical endpoints, driving strains of metal and electronic music to some kind of brink of extremes that the Body and the Haxan Cloak's individual output had never taken them before. There's certainly an end-of-all-things atmosphere, but perhaps more importantly a strong sense of unlearning everything they knew in an attempt to push music into a totally new space. Not that this is music without precedent; there are shades of Demdike Stare, Prurient, Earth, and Sunn O))) at various times. But the execution of I Shall Die Here is so full-blooded, so committed to forcing your head underwater to the point of blackout, that it's hard not to view this as a singular piece, out there on its own, in a place most people wouldn't want to go anywhere near. It adds a chillingly lonely air to the work, making it morbidly fascinating to see its participants head out on a road pointed eternally downward, landing in a place wracked by torment and lost hopes.
